Tulsa Tribune

Tulsa Tribune Building
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Tribune Building in 2012
Location	20 East Archer Street Tulsa, Oklahoma
Built	1924
NRHP Reference #	79003644
Added to NRHP	July 16, 1979

The Tulsa Tribune was an afternoon daily newspaper published in Tulsa, Oklahoma from 1919 to 1992. Owned and run by three generations of the Jones family, the Tribune closed in 1992 after the termination of its joint operating agreement with the morning Tulsa World.

The newspaper ceased using the building in 1942. It became a religious mission for the homeless until 2001, when it was converted into apartments. The building is now known as the Tribune Lofts.

In 1895, a group of Tulsans established a publication called The New Era, intended to convey a more positive image of the then-small town than that found in the existing paper, The Indian Republican. Supporters of Democratic Party leader William Jennings Bryan, they changed the name of The New Era to The Democrat in 1898. The paper was unprofitable and the publisher, R. L. Lunsford, sold it to Dave Jesse, who established the Tulsa Democrat as a daily in 1904, and sold it to William Stryker in 1905. Stryker sold the paper in 1916 (or 1915) to Charles Page, founder of the neighboring city of Sand Springs, who used the newspaper to promote his plan for the city of Tulsa to obtain its water from Shell Creek, near Sand Springs, rather than from Spavinaw in eastern Oklahoma.

In November 1919, the Tulsa Democrat had 21,682 subscribers. In December 1919, Page sold the newspaper to Richard Lloyd Jones, who had previously owned the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, Wisconsin. Jones changed the paper's name to Tulsa Tribune-Democrat; then, on January 19, 1920, he changed it again, to Tulsa Tribune. As foreshadowed by this name change, the Tribune became a consistently Republican paper; it never endorsed a Democrat for U.S. president, and did not endorse a Democrat for governor until 1958.

Richard Lloyd Jones (April 14, 1873 – December 4, 1963) was the son of an influential Unitarian minister, Jenkin Lloyd Jones. He co-founded Tulsa's All Souls Unitarian Church, now one of the largest Unitarian Universalist churches in the world. Jones commissioned his cousin, Frank Lloyd Wright, to build him a house in Tulsa; constructed in 1929, it is known as Westhope and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.